Every week this column is supposed to be life after you graduate college, but a big part of that life for most people is Facebook. And I’d like to advocate this prosperous but dysfunctional idea for a company put on its big boy pants and become a real company.
Now that may sound baffling to some people. They might say “It’s already a multi-billion dollar empire. What do you mean become a “real,” “functional” company? Zuckerberg makes more money in an hour than we do in a year, that sounds pretty real and damn functional.” And it does on paper, except that it isn’t in reality. [Reality being a concept some Facebook user have trouble with, as it might shock them to find “Going to the club with Tiffany!!!!!!” isn’t as newsworthy as “Somalian hordes starving to death.”]
Facebook isn’t a fully functioning company. They have a Peter Pan, borderline autistic founder/CEO that refuses to take it public at every turn–thus no one can actually determine a true valuation for the company until he does–in Zuckerberg, a big shareholder and early funder (Peter Thiel) who would rather build man-made Libertarian islands free from government “tyranny” in international waters than focus on if his site violates people’s rights, and there is still no fully functioning chain of command at this “billion” dollar company.
By chain of command I mean customer service people that users can talk to when they have a problem. For example: If you have a bad experience with your MasterCard bill, you call them up, haggle with a person for a mind numbing amount of time, and that person will make a decision. If you don’t like that decision, you can appeal it to their manager, then his manager, and all the way up until you talk to someone with a “Vice” or “President” or “Director” in their title.
AT FACEBOOK, if you have a problem like…your profile getting deleted for no given reason, you can send them an email, not call because they have no number for that, but send an email to them. Then someone will take their sweet ass time getting back to you (the one time it happened to me it took three weeks), and say “Sorry, our decision is final” without telling you why they made it. Then you can say “I’d like to speak with your superior” and they WON’T let you. You will talk to some snot nosed intern working the lowest rung of the Facebook ladder or you’ll talk to no one. Other little things like privacy invasion or censorship or banning you from adding friends for no given reason are also dealt with in the same manner that makes the CIA look accessible.
Then you have Facebook’s repeated refusal to address the issue of giving out your personal information. Just this last week they added a new feature where you have to give a location when you post a status and it won’t let you make one up (like “Mars, Space” or “None of Your Damn Business, AL”) or disable the feature. This is all so Zuckerberg can continue to make money from giving out more information than his users want accessed where a fully functioning company would actually respond to people asking for a change in something almost universally unpopular.
So just to be clear, this is a company that engages in shady practices better fitting a dorm room (where FB got started), has no fully functioning chain of command to deal with customer service (keeping people happy is kind of essential for a company that doesn’t make anything and is basically useless), and won’t go public even though it could have years ago making it impossible to know how much it’s really worth (maybe it’s actually worthless and that’s why Zuckerberg is so frugal). All of the company’s very real infrastructure problems are hidden under a cloak of “youth appeal” which is to say business minds really like Facebook because of its unprecedented access to young minds. Well, young people get tired of shit very quickly (just ask MySpace). And most of the people I talk to are getting VERY tired of the company that won’t grow up.